What Are You Telling Yourself?
Rewrite your personal narrative to save your relationships
Today I would like to introduce a wonderful book by a Korean practicing psychologist and a couple therapy specialist from Gottman Institute, Dr. Choi Sung Ae, called “Couples Need Remodeling Too”.
She makes a parallel between taking care of a house and working on marriage.
“If you get a flat tire, you fix it, you do not abandon your car. If you have a broken window or a clogged sink, you work on fixing them, instead of breaking down your house. In the same way, marriages can be fixed”.
Here are some of my takeaways from the book:
- Recognize the enemy within (our own toxicity)
- Rewrite your “life script” (”personal narrative”). In psychology it is also called internal dialog, perception & cognition, self-talk or self-concepts.
The author suggests that just as we take care of our bank accounts, we should also take care of our “life accounts”: health account, resilience account, generosity account, and financial account, etc.
How to read and edit your life script: look for the following red flags in your speech or journal, or in your inner dialog with yourself.
- Generalizations: words like ‘always’, ‘never’, ‘finally’, ‘not even once’
- Titles and labels attached to concepts (”Our house is a pigsty”, “Marriage is an institution, so it’s only for crazy folk”)
- Selective memory (remembering only short-comings rather than advantages, shifting all responsibility on the partner even after divorcing them)
- Seeing world as extremes (dualistic concepts like black or white, good or evil, success or failure, master or slave; either this or that and nothing in between)
- Excessive self-criticism and beating-up of one’s self
- Taking everything personally (if all staff is reprimanded by their boss, that one employee may take it personally and feel targeted)
- Jumping to conclusions (a husband looks at a three-course dinner, carefully prepared by his spouse, and comments “Our guests would not like it”.)
- Faulty understanding of control (either a perfectionist who believes in having everything under control or a defeatist who thinks that the whole world joined forces to make them feel miserable, and there is absolutely nothing they can do to make things better)
- Confusing emotions for reason (if it rains and the person feels bad, they may see all events of the day in a negative light)
When you marry someone, you marry their past, present, future, their habits, voice tone, childhood memories and trauma, and their dreams about future.
It would be great to know all those things you marry into before walking to the altar with that person, but unfortunately, that is impossible.
How can you know another person if you do not even know yourself?
That is why, I believe, it is important to look intently into your own self before trying to fix your partner. Think carefully about your personal narrative, and how, being a person with such narrative, you ended up choosing your partner, and allowed for such situations to happen.
I call that process a “Workshop on editing and rewriting your life — script”.
